A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

On balkanizing reality.............

Of course, when I urge a multidisciplinary approach - that you've got to have the main models from a broad array of disciplines and you've got to use them all - I'm really asking you to ignore jurisdictional boundaries. And the world isn't organized that way. It discourages the jumping of jurisdictional boundaries. Big bureaucratic businesses discourage it. And, of course, academia itself discourages it. All I can say there is that, in that respect, academia is horribly wrong and dysfunctional. And some of the worst dysfunctions in businesses come from the fact that they balkanize reality into little individual departments with territoriality and turf protection and so forth. So if you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries. You don't have to know it all. Just take the best big ideas from all these disciplines. And it's not that hard to do.